


the place where I am going

by lovetincture



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Castiel-centric, Episode: s15e18 Despair, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-07
Updated: 2020-11-07
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:14:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27433363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovetincture/pseuds/lovetincture
Summary: His feelings for Dean didn’t come to him all at once. He uncovered them over time, peeling back layer after layer and revealing facets to the light. The process of loving Dean has been one of learning himself. Of walking the dark, echoing caverns of his heart and finding rooms he didn’t know were there.Or, the angel and his love.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester, Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester
Comments: 7
Kudos: 56





	the place where I am going

**Author's Note:**

> So I don't usually go here but... I had to go here, just this once.

Sparrows chatter in the trees outside, noisy and talking over one another. Dean and Sam don’t notice. Castiel thinks of older things,  _ Not a single sparrow falls to the ground without your Father knowing of it. _ Your father, mine. Assurances for other times.

The recollection hits him with a sweet, bright burst of pain somewhere in the location of his chest. He considers raising his hand to rub at it, a human impulse picked up from one or the both of them, but he lets it pass.

Castiel had liked the idea of his father more than the reality. It’s a hard pill to swallow. He liked the idea of a wise, loving Creator, the lord of sparrows and small things. This too, he lets go.

They’re bickering in the front seat.

“I  _ told _ you it wasn’t up this far. I told you to take the last turnoff before the hill.”

“Yeah, well how was I supposed to know? All these houses look the same.”

“You were supposed to listen to me.”

“The last time I listened to you, we got turned around in that swamp for five hours. I’m still picking swamp gunk out of my good boots.”

Sam huffs in irritation, lips pressed together as he stares out the window. There are things he wants to say. Castiel knows this from the familiarity born of long observation. He also knows, like Sam knows, that there’s no use talking to Dean when he gets like this.

Sam opens his mouth a few miles down the road anyway, when they’re still lost in these shockingly similar cul-de-sacs. The jury is still out on whether this owes to black magic or the poor imagination of something called a homeowners’ association.

Dean reaches over and raises the volume on the stereo, and Sam’s mouth goes flat and white again.

Castiel considers Sam’s reflection in the passenger side mirror from his perch in the back. He considers his own. They are all of them looking older, the fleeing of collagen, the pigment cells in a scalp gradually deciding to die. It’s strange to mark the passing of time by his vessel’s own decay. It’s strange to see it in others.

Once, he might have thought it beautiful. His father’s own design.

He turns his gaze back out the window, the tree of sparrows already vanishing in the distance. He hears their song for miles.

* * *

It’s strange to think of what he feels for Dean as love. If asked, he would have said he loved Dean right at the very beginning. From the time he plucked a mangled, guttering soul from Hell and raised him into the light, Castiel would have said he loved him.

Castiel would have also said he loved Sam, that he loved Bobby Singer, that he loved Joe Mendenhall, a plumber who lives 20 miles to the south of Lawrence, Kansas, who Castiel has never met. He loved them because he loved all of his father’s creations. He stayed with them because it was right.

His feelings for Dean didn’t come to him all at once. He uncovered them over time, peeling back layer after layer and revealing facets to the light. The process of loving Dean has been one of learning himself. Of walking the dark, echoing caverns of his heart and finding rooms he didn’t know were there.

He saw an old woman teaching a young girl to carve narcissus bulbs once. It was hot and sticky during the summer. They were sitting on overturned milk crates stacked on a porch covered in peeling paint. They were wielding small, sharp knives, peeling away layer after layer of white flesh, as delicate and fragile as paper. The girl wrinkled her nose as a thin curl of narcissus skin blew into her face.

Castiel was drawn to the absurdity of their craft, feet making tracks up an overgrown sidewalk where roots ate at the cement.

“Excuse me,” he asked. “What are you doing?”

The old woman held out her work to let him see, white bulb in a brown palm, the green of new growth shining through.

“Carving narcissus bulbs. Sap’s poisonous. Gotta watch out.” She showed a yellow grin.

“Why? Will they not grow on their own?”

“Not as beautifully.”

Cas absorbed that while the woman leaned over, pointing to something in the little girl’s bulb, a spot of dark rot, before easing it gently out of her hand. The old bulb landed in the cardboard box full of discarded roots, and a new, shiny-slick bulb was placed in her hand.

“Do you do this often?” Cas asked.

“Every year,” the woman said. The little girl—her granddaughter, probably—has said nothing.

She eyed him, not unkind but not kind either. Not welcoming. Her eyes reminded him of the shining flat rocks at the bottom of a riverbed. He loved her like he loves all of them. She clearly wanted him to leave.

“Thank you,” he said, wanting to stay to watch longer but unwilling to overstay the welcome he was never extended in the first place.

He turned to go, wistful. Already regretting the loss of it. It’s all dust in the end—the flowers, the women and everything else, but he’d have liked to stay.

“Hang on.” The woman held up one of the finished buds, one already flowering. “I’ll give it to you if you promise to take care of it. It needs to be soaked in water and changed every day.”

Castiel took it. He felt the smooth, unblemished edges of the bulb, cool in his hand. He did want it. In the end, he handed it back.

* * *

Castiel has lived for eons. It’s strange that he would be struck down by a human whose life is the span of a gnat. He has seen so much. He has been for so long.

It’s the incongruity of it that’s charming—the randomness, the lack of purpose. He can appreciate it even while caught in its sway.

He doesn’t love Dean because Dean is the best man he’s ever met. He knows, objectively, that there have been men better, along every axis imaginable. Men stronger, more righteous, more purely loving. Men freer with their emotions, men who have suffered and fought and endured as Dean has.

He knows these things to be true. It just matters very little. His heart has set itself on Dean, and even in this, there’s wonder. A final rebellion of heaven, and it almost doesn’t matter that Dean doesn’t—will never feel the same.

Dean loves Sam, and Sam loves Dean, and Cas loves Dean.

He didn’t expect to have even this. It seems almost greedy to ask for more.

* * *

Castiel doesn’t know if there are dreams in the Empty. He can’t remember anything before a voice called him out of the darkness. Tonight, the void feels electric as it crawls up his skin.

He looks at Dean, and Dean watches him go.

He hopes there are dreams. When he sleeps, he hopes he dreams of Dean.

**Author's Note:**

> "And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. You know the way to the place where I am going." 😭😭😭
> 
> Come find me on [Twitter](http://twitter.com/lovetincture) <3


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